Hi Jonathan_S,
Thank you for the example.
I think the energy budget for BC decoys to simulate SD engines back around '05-'06 is pretty impressive myself.
But doesn't that make the free flying decoy types over 15 years old?
L
Jonathan_S wrote:**quote="Weird Harold"**[quote="lyonheart"]What were all the previous decoys from OBS onward doing, if not playing with the ship's gravitic signature etc, given that's what the missile's are targeting?**/quote**
From the description of Lorelei's first use against Adm Filareta, previous decoys either didn't have the energy budget to mimic SDs or they were tethered and drew power from the mother ship.
Go back far enough and you're right, see the trick Honor and Mark Brentworth pulled at 4th Yeltson, where Brentworth's BCs used tractored decoys to mimic
Gryphon-class SDs to bluff Theisman and LePic into breaking off. However we've already seen free flying, micro-fusion powered, (and missile tube launchable) ghost rider drones mimic SDs.
Ashes of Victory wrote:BatDiv 62's internal launchers were busy firing something besides shipkillers. They were firing more electronic warfare drones that took station on the formation and began to thresh the Peeps' targeting systems with jamming, and others that took on the appearance of more superdreadnoughts, more battlecruisers, more heavy cruisers, all beckoning to the Peep's sensors.
Such decoys had always been available, but only in limited numbers. The power required to sustain a convincing false sensor image of a warship in engagement range was so high that a drone required direct power transmission from the ship it was protecting. That meant standard practice had always been to deploy decoys only on tractors and in low numbers. But the same technology which had provided the power plants for the RMN's FTL recon drones had been brought to bear on the decoy problem by the R&D types responsible for Project Ghost Rider, and the result—one of the results—was a completely independent unit with an endurance of up to twenty minutes from internal power alone, depending on the strength of the sensor image it had to duplicate. And one that could be fired from one of the new capital missile tubes, at that. Now BatDiv 62's internal launchers went to rapid fire, spewing them out, multiplying the Peeps' targets catastrophically with each broadside.
I assume that Lorelei is a significantly enhanced version of those Buttercup-era Ghost Rider free flying decoys.
Maybe it's got much longer endurance, significantly higher power budgets, is much more survivable (to decoy multiple waves), or other improvements. But just the ability to free fly a decoy off on internal power had existed for at least 8 years by the time Fileretta blundered into the Manticoran home system.[/quote]
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